Paul Flores Convicted in Smart Killing, Scheduled for Sentencing in December

On Oct. 18, a San Luis Obispo jury convicted Paul Flores of murdering Kristin Smart, despite a body never being recovered. Flores’ father, Ruben was acquitted of being an accessory after the fact. The conflicting verdicts were read moments apart in the same courtroom.

Prosecutors maintain the younger Flores, now 46, killed the 19-year-old during an attempted rape on May 25, 1996, in his dorm room at Cal Poly, where both were first-year students. Flores was the last person seen with Smart as he walked her home from an off-campus party where she became intoxicated. Smart was declared dead in 2002.

Ruben Flores, now 81, allegedly helped bury the slain student behind his home in the nearby community of Arroyo Grande and later dug up the remains and moved them.

The younger Flores had long been considered a suspect in the killing. He had a black eye when investigators interviewed him. He told them he got it playing basketball with friends, who denied his account, according to court records. He later changed his story to say he bumped his head while working on his car.

Paul Flores was arrested in San Pedro in April 2021 following a raid on his house a year prior. The Smart case was revived following a true crime podcast, In Our Backyard, which retraced events and included interviews with retired reporters, detectives, and witnesses.

Behind latticework beneath the deck of his large house on a dead-end street, archaeologists working for the police in March 2021 found a soil disturbance roughly about the size of a casket and the presence of human blood, prosecutors said. The blood was too degraded to extract a DNA sample.

Flores will be sentenced in December.